After spending the entirety of October tackling Ed Gein titles such as Monster: The Ed Gein Story, as well as Deranged and In The Light of the Moon, as well as Peacock’s limited Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy series, Jenn and I needed a break from human serial killers.
For November, we’re turning our attention to Aquatic Disasters: real life cases of peril and human adversity out on the dangerous open water. First up: Wolfgang Peterson‘s 2000 spectacle The Perfect Storm, featuring an all-star cast that includes George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, John C Reilly, William Fichtner, John Hawkes, and Diane Lane.
The film, which was written by William D. Wittliff and adapted from Sebastian Junger‘s non-fiction book of the same name, follows the crew of the swordfish fishing vessel Andrea Gail. In 1991, Captain Billy Tyne (Clooney) and his five man crew ventured far off the coast of Newfoundland in search of a late season catch and got caught in what meteorologist Todd Gross (Christopher McDonald) described as “The Perfect Storm.”
The film depicts their epic struggle to survive, the women they left behind, including Lane’s Chris, and several others caught in the storm. This includes a trio aboard a sailboat, as well as the Air National Guard helicopter crew dispatched to pull survivors out of the water.
At a certain point, the film segues into fiction territory because we’ll never know what exactly happened aboard the Andrea Gail after they broke off contact with the Captain of Hannah Boden, Linda Greenlaw (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), though the bodies of the men were never recovered.
Despite being a tragedy, The Perfect Storm is also a quintessential summer action spectacle, as well as an ode to blue collar workers, and a dazzling special effects feast that still holds up twenty-five years later.
Does James Horner‘s score go way too hard for way too long in order to make audiences feel something? Yes, but despite this, The Perfect Storm remains a pretty entertaining piece of “based on a true story” fiction.
If you want even more Murder Made Fiction, be sure to check out the pod’s Patreon feed for ~110 hours of bonus content, including episode by episode coverage of November titles such as Netflix’s The Monster of Florence and Hulu’s ripped-from-the-headlines limited series, Murdaugh: Murder in the Family starring Jason Clarke and Patricia Arquette.
The post The Ocean is a Killer in 2000’s ‘The Perfect Storm’ [Murder Made Fiction Podcast] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
